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Ben I.
Ben I.
4:18 AM
I guess I mean things like using a single byte to hold 8 different cardinal directions in a maze, and to use bit-shifts and xors to accomplish direction reversals. It's like... totally needless storage and instruction optimizations. Certain (very smart) kids fall in love with this stuff. There's a certain elegance to the solutions that can't be denied, but the code is also getting hard to read and make sense of.
And, again, these kids are not even remotely interested in professional software engineering. They may well become CS professors, though.
 
Gypsy Spellweaver
Gypsy Spellweaver
4:54 AM
@BenI. I went through a phrase where 'elegance' was king after I learned APL, ca. 90s. Very 'math-y' in its implementation. Later when I used Perl in a professional capacity I found myself using statements that needed unwrapping to explain to associates. At times I still do such tricks, in the first draft, but unwrap them for the 'production' version.
 

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